Tuesday, March 16, 2010

March Madness is here...are we excited?

It’s NCAA basketball tourney time, and if you’re like me, you don’t really care. Yet somehow I have my own tournament bracket all filled out and sitting on my desk at work. This is because for the past few years my department has had our own “Masters of the Hardwood” competition. The winner gets a bobblehead basketball trophy, a gift card, and most of all, bragging rights.

The surprising thing about our department competition is that 90 percent of us are women, most of us know very little about college basketball, and some even live in Canada. But, when our vice president initiates this annual competition, we humor him and jump on board.

Some of us make our picks completely at random while others do a little Googling to check out the rankings. I usually base my picks off the rankings, but throw in a few random upsets for good measure. (No, I did not pick the Minnesota Gophers to have an upset…I’ve followed Minnesota sports for too long.)

Amazingly, it gets pretty competitive. (I mean, personally I’m not a competitive person or anything, but…oh who am I kidding…I love to win!) We usually have a fair amount of smack talk going around over email, which is probably the most fun part. I have yet to win in past years, but I’ve come close and usually finish in the top half of the standings. That’s a good enough reputation for me.

I will say that by participating in a tournament contest, I do at least become fan enough to pay attention to the scores, though I don’t typically watch the games. (Remember, hockey is my game, not basketball.) Nevertheless…go Kansas!

2 comments:

We have a family competition every year which I have yet to win. Some years I do research, watch a lot of b-ball, and pay attention to SportCenter before making my picks. Other years I just go quickly through it and go mostly by the seeding with a few upsets put in. Over time I can see no discernible difference in my results. Oh well. As you said, it is all about the bragging rights and for the last year I have had to look at our small trophy(which my brother and I made) because my wife won last year mostly by picking teams off of perceived reputations or uniform color schemes.